5 Passive Income Ideas That Don’t Involve Writing

Today’s guest post comes from a good friend, John, over at Passive Family Income. I am honoured to have someone like John write a guest post for EIP, since he’s been doing this for a while. Here we go:

It can be very easy to get wrapped up in thinking the only way to build passive income is from writing. After all there are plenty of article content sites, such as eHow, that will pay you a portion of advertising earnings for your content. There is a lot to like about online sites like these since most of them are free and come with very low barriers to entry.

A few other passive income ideas that come to mind that require considerable writing include – publishing an eBook, building a niche website, article marketing, and maintaining a membership forum. While each of these examples are very low cost to start up, they all require a lot of writing.

If writing isn’t your thing, or you want a break (I know I could use one), then check out a few other passive income ideas identified below.

Passive Income Ideas that Don’t Require Writing

Here is a list of 5 common passive income ideas that don’t require any writing. If you are tired of pumping out content over and over, you may want to check one of these ideas out.

1. Certificate of Deposit – Investing money in a certificate of deposit (CD) is one of the best passive income opportunities available. As long as the investment is insured (i.e. FDIC), there is very little risk involved. While the interest potential is lower than other types of investments, a CD can offered a guaranteed source of income with no risk. You can even setup a certificate of deposit to automatically reinvest which is a truly hands-off income stream!
2. High Yield Savings Account – While not the most luxurious sounding passive income idea, a high yield savings account can provide a consistent and steady return on your investment. The one downside of this type of investment is that when interest rates are low, so are the returns on these investment choices. Even with low interest rates, a high yielding savings account can be an excellent way to diversify your income.
3. Dividend Paying Stocks – Long term dividend growth investors have been making huge returns on high yielding stocks for a long time. Provided you are an educated investor and don’t go chasing the highest yields, investing in dividend paying stocks can be a great way to earn passive income – even in a really bad recession. If you are looking for a way to automate this type of income stream, consider setting up a Dividend Reinvestment Plan (DRIP) through your online discount broker. These types of plans will automatically reinvest your dividend income back into more shares of the stock which makes it a very passive opportunity.
4. Micro Loans – Investing in micro loans is another passive income idea that may be worth a shot if you are looking for something new. Micro lending (commonly referred to as peer to peer lending) allows investors such as yourself to loan out small amounts of money ($25 or higher) to your peers. There are some risks involved with micro lending, but the potential return makes it worth a second look.
5. Online Store – While not the easiest business to setup, building an online store can be automated overtime to become a passive opportunity. Of all the previous examples, an online store has the potential to earn much more income than the others. There are however some downside risks and the time it can take to build it is much longer than investing in a CD for example. Other than setting up some advertisements to your stie, an online store requires very little writing.

Final Thoughts

All of the passive income ideas listed above have a common difference than what many of us are use to. They all require very little writing (if any) to start. The other commonality that they share is each one of them requires an upfront monetary investment which is another change from writing on sites like eHow or HubPages. Some of the examples are riskier than others (i.e. micro lending), while some like a certificate of deposit can provide steady income from many years.

No matter if you enjoy writing or not, building diversified income streams is very important. The next time you get that nice check from AdSense or Clickbank, consider kicking off one of these other passive income ideas with your earnings. You will be happy you did!

What other passive income ideas have you started that don’t involved writing?

This is a guest post from John at Passive Family Income. If you liked this post, please consider subscribing to his RSS feed and following him on Twitter!

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